Shulamith Firestone Biography

Canadian-born feminist writer Shulamith Firestone (born 1945) was just
25 years old when her first book,
The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution
, ignited a minor firestorm of controversy and public debate in 1970.
In it, Firestone argued that true gender equality was impossible to
achieve until science freed women from their biological role as
bearers of children. She envisioned an artificial womb in which
fetuses could be grown until they reached the newborn stage, at which
point they would be raised for the next several years in a
commune-like household of eight to ten adults.
The Dialectic of Sex
was Firestone's sole contribution to the canon of feminist
theory, but the book continued
to be required reading in college women's studies programs some
thirty years after its appearance.

Firestone was born in Ottawa, the federal capital of Canada, in 1945, into
an Orthodox Jewish family that later relocated to St. Louis, Missouri. Her
younger sister, Tirzah Firestone, became a well-known rabbi and author of
books on female figures in Jewish mysticism and the Kabbalah. As a young
woman, Firestone studied at Washington University in St. Louis before
moving on to the Art Institute of Chicago, where she earned a fine arts
degree in painting in 1967. During her time there, she became interested
in new theories about women's roles in society, and was one of the
organizers of the Westside Group, which later evolved into the Chicago
Women's Liberation Union, the first women's liberation group
in the United States.

Founded Trio of Groups

Later in 1967, Firestone headed to New York City, where she continued her
involvement in the nascent "women's liberation"
movement, as it was termed at the time. She helped found a new group
there, New York Radical Women (NYRW), but ideological divisions between
the more politically minded members of the group—who were adherents
of socialism—and radical feminists like Firestone split the group.
The socialist women believed that political reform would bring gender
equality, while radicals disagreed with this proposition, contending that
leftist-oriented groups still carried over many discriminatory ideas and
practices despite their avowed support for the idea of equality on all
levels. Many of the political groups that drew feminist women into their
fold failed to give women equal status or allowed them to advance to
leadership roles, for example, and some even deemed a separate
women's movement actually counterrevolutionary to socialist goals.

NYRW disbanded in 1969, and Firestone went on to found another group,
called the Redstockings, that same year with Ellen Willis, a writer. The
group took its name from the Bluestockings, an informal coalition of women
intellectuals in mid-18th century Britain, and used "red"
because it was the color of revolution and socialist upheaval. Its
founding, noted an essay on Firestone in
Feminist Writers
, had been prompted by their "disgust with the blatant antagonism
toward women's liberation shown by leftist men, in this case as
directed against a women's protest (during which Firestone gave a
speech) scheduled as part of a program of the Counter-Inaugural
demonstration organized by the National Mobilization Committee to End the
War in Vietnam held in Washington, D.C., in January 1969." Though
Firestone's tenure with the group was brief, the Redstockings had a
few notable moments: they disrupted the New York State Assembly's
debate on abortion-law reform, and staged a sit-in at
Ladies' Home Journal
magazine.

Later in 1969, Firestone left the Redstockings to form a third group, the
New York Radical Feminists, with Anne Koedt. Within a year, however, some
of its newer members claimed that Firestone and the other leadership were
elitist, a charge likely linked to the middle-class backgrounds of women
like Firestone and the perceived ease with which they handled the press
and publicized the group's cause. "Rather than a matter of
jealousy, the concern was over whose version of feminism would become
popularized," the
Feminist Writers
essay noted. "The fear was that women with more access to the
media would be in a position to become leaders of a movement that
officially rejected the idea of leadership."

Book Bought by Mainstream Publisher

Firestone left the New York Radical Feminists in 1970, exhausted by the
internal struggles and infighting within the movement over the past few
years. Though a painter by training, she drifted into writing almost
accidentally by authoring the manifestos of the feminist organizations
with which she was involved. She served as editor of a magazine,
Notes from the First Year: Women's Liberation
, published by the NYRW in June of 1968 and on sale for "$ .50 to
Women/$1.00 to Men," its masthead read. She also coedited
Notes from the Second Year: Radical Feminism
with Koedt, in 1970, but was already working on her groundbreaking book,
The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution
, by that point.

Published in October of 1970 by William Morrow,
The Dialectic of Sex
drew upon the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and Friedrich Engels
(1820–1895), the political philosophers whose most important set of
theories, known as Marxism, gave rise to the ideology of Communism; the
ideas of Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) and
French feminist writer Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) also shaped
some of the themes in Firestone's book. Approaching the topic of
political theory from a feminist viewpoint, she argued that gender
inequality was, in the end, ultimately dictated by biology. Pregnancy,
childbirth, and childrearing were a vital part of human existence, but the
need to reproduce the species efficiently had made women vulnerable, and a
patriarchal system had been imposed on much of the human race as a means
of perpetuating the system. Few could dispute the fact, she wrote,
"that Women throughout history before the advent of birth control
were at the continual mercy of their biology—menstruation,
menopause, and 'female ills,' constant painful childbirth,
wet-nursing and care of infants, all of which made them dependent on males
(whether brother, father, husband, lover, or clan, government,
community-at-large) for physical survival."

Firestone's proposed solution borrowed from Marx and Engels: their
philosophy maintained that the proletariat workers of the 19th-century
Industrial Revolution were the exploited class in a capitalist society,
and justice would not come until they seized the means of production, or
literally took over the factories and equipment that served to enslave
them. Similarly, Firestone argued that women were the oppressed class in
modern societies, and that they should seize control over the very thing
that exploited them: human reproduction. The process, she theorized, could
be turned over to science and privately run laboratories instead. New
advances in reproductive technology would lead to an artificial womb,
which would forever free women from the
burden and dangers of pregnancy and childbirth—the latter which
Firestone's text rather infamously likened to expelling a pumpkin,
though in far more colorful language. Only by removing the real biological
differences between the sexes in this way, she asserted, could genuine
equality be achieved.

Provocative Ideas Stirred Debate

The Dialectic of Sex
addressed the issue of raising children after their incubation period by
imagining a communal living arrangement in which biological parents would
not be solely responsible for their offspring; instead a household of
eight to ten adults would raise a child. Such units could apply for a
license to have a child artificially, Firestone theorized, or a female
member could carry the child by natural means but would not be its only
parent. Her book also urged unrestricted access to contraception and
government-subsidized child care as two more goals that could free women
and, she argued, the human race, from what she termed "the tyranny
of the biological family…. Marx was on to something more profound
than he knew when he observed that the family contained within itself in
embryo all the antagonisms that later develop on a wide scale within the
society and the state. For unless revolution uproots the basic social
organisation, the biological family—the vinculum through which the
psychology of power can always be smuggled—the tapeworm of
exploitation will never be annihilated."

Not surprisingly, Firestone's book caused a stir in the mainstream
media. Reviews were largely negative, with a
Times Literary Supplement
critic calling it "atrociously written … in language that
varies from the most clotted kind of semi-scientific jargon to phrases as
ungrammatical as they are ugly." Nevertheless, it became a
bestseller as well as required reading in many women's studies
programs at the college level. Firestone's ideas about an
artificial womb predated the first successful in-vitro fertilization
babies by several years, and by the turn of the 21st century,
reproductive-biology scientists were seeking to erase the viability line
for fetuses, who have a difficult time surviving outside of the womb
before the 25th week of pregnancy in the event of premature delivery.
Though a true artificial womb had not yet been realized, her ideas about
donor-sperm banks and homeschooling via computer did come to fruition a
generation later.

Firestone virtually disappeared after the publication of her book. She
reportedly suffered from a mental illness, and was hospitalized on several
occasions. A later radical feminist, Andrea Dworkin (1946–2005),
was interviewed for the British newspaper the
Guardian
in 2000, and told journalist Linda Grant that Firestone was "poor
and crazy. She rents a room in a house and fills it with junk, then gets
kicked out and moves into another room and fills that with junk." A
volume of short stories from Firestone,
Airless Spaces
, appeared in 1998.

Time-Capsule Film
Shulie

Around that same time, Firestone was the subject of a remake of a short
documentary film by an Art Institute of Chicago instructor and filmmaker,
Elisabeth Subrin. Subrin had discovered a never-released documentary short
featuring Firestone that was made during her final year at the school;
Subrin then reshot it in its entirety, with a young woman cast as
Firestone instead, and released it in 1997 as
Shulie
. It debuted at the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, Minnesota, in an
exhibit titled
The Shock of the View
. Writing in the exhibition materials, media-arts scholar Bill Horrigan
called it a "portrait of an emerging artist, shown in the studio,
at her job in the post office, in interviews with the off-screen male
filmmakers, and weathering an appalling crit session as her paintings in
progress are glared upon by a jury of five male instructors." In
the original, Firestone tells the camera, "I just generally
identify with minority groups as opposed to, you know, the large masses,
the large homogenous mass of people. I just automatically feel a bond with
people who aren't exactly in things."

Though her involvement was brief, Firestone is considered one of the key
figures in what is called second-wave feminism, the term used for the
movement which had begun to challenge long-held ideas about gender roles;
first-wave feminists, by contrast, focused on more easily legislated
issues such as voting rights and equal pay. Le Tigre, the rock band
fronted by Kathleen Hanna, performs a song on their 2001 LP,
Feminist Sweepstakes
, "F.Y.R. (Fifty Years of Ridicule)" whose lyrics were
inspired by Firestone's book.